5 Things You Didn't Know: Planet Earth

In 2006, after five years and more than $25 million, BBC’s award-winning Natural History Unit, in conjunction with the Discovery Channel, NHK and the CBC, presented the landmark 11-part nature documentary series Planet Earth, calling it “the definitive look at the diversity of our planet.”

But, like everything else that has been said about this groundbreaking series, which was filmed entirely in HD, even a description that conclusive is deficient. Awed critics and viewers alike joined in a chorus of “ohs and ahs” that expressed, as well or better than words, the visceral authority of their shared astonishment: The natural world presented in the series is so dazzling that, in some other discussion, you wouldn’t hesitate to call it otherworldly.

What follows are five things you didn’t know about the BBC’s staggering homage to the Blue Planet, Planet Earth.

1- One Planet Earth scene required over a year to shoot

The second episode of the series, entitled “Mountains,” endeavored to follow the hunt of the snow leopard, considered “the highest land predator on the planet” and notoriously difficult to find hunting in the wild.

Initially, crews took two separate trips to Ladakh, a region in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, but although each trip lasted eight weeks, they came away with about 10 seconds’ worth of footage — all of which went unused in the original series. In an effort to get more footage, they changed locations and went to the Karakoram Mountains in Pakistan. Once there, the BBC stopped them from entering for safety reasons, since U.S. Marines and other military groups were in search of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. They had to wait a full year before entering the region and capturing the footage they wanted.

2- A new species was discovered during Planet Earth filming

With scores of camera crews digging under the snow-covered Gobi desert, scaling near-vertical cliffs in Pakistan, soaring over Mount Everest or diving under the ice in Lake Baikal, going pole to pole, burrowing deep into the Cave of Swallows in Mexico or cruising above the Himalayas with golden eagles, following lions on the hunt in the Namib or taking in water-worthy macaques gourmandizing on crabs, discovering a new species was almost a given. In fact, the remarkable thing is that they claim to have discovered just one — a blind cave fish in Thailand.

Some of the numerous breathtaking scenes in the series were shot with pioneering time-manipulation techniques that leave the viewer awestruck. In addition to incredible never-before-imagined time-lapse footage of tropical storms filmed from the air, the series also used a flash strobe system of time-lapse photography thousands of meters under the surface of the ocean to capture events that otherwise move too slowly for us to fully appreciate, such as sea urchins slowly devouring forests of kelp or totally bizarre sea creatures consuming the carcass of a dead tuna.